Wales has deep-rooted socialist, anarchist and environmentalist traditions which could flourish under independence, but only if we fight for it.
Image: Rally for Welsh independence, Merthyr Tydfil, 2019, by ConnexionG
In the first book of his ‘Welsh trilogy’, Border Country, the Welsh socialist theorist and writer Raymond Williams described the end of local industry in Wales in memorably bleak terms. His characters narrate the pitiless sweep of international capitalism through a small community and the depopulation to come through migration for employment:
“…this place is finished, as it was. This’ll be just a trunk road, you watch, between the mining valleys and the factories in the Midlands. So look carefully at it, you’re seeing the last of it.”
Although published in 1960, Williams’ depiction of what Mark Fisher would describe over fifty years later as “the slow cancellation of the future” has only gained in resonance after the cataclysmic end of coalmining in Wales and the economic and political stagnancy of the decades that followed – in spite of twenty years of devolution. However the trilogy’s final book, The Fight for Manod, published in 1979, offered a brighter vista.
In this book Williams looked to possible alternatives for post-industrial Wales, as well as the vested interests and political imperatives they would need to confront to have a chance at a successful and sustainable future. Manod is “a new type of city” to be built on the hill-farms of south Wales, integrating traditional agriculture with technologically advanced urban centres, a community “conceived, from the very beginning, in post-industrial terms”.
An obvious connection exists between The Fight for Manod and Williams’ 1973 study The Country and the City, in which he analysed history as the progress of an international capitalist and imperialist project, and proposed a new relationship between city and countryside which could bring together the sympatico impulses of socialism and ecology.
By this point Williams, discontented with the failure of post-war Labour governments to deliver the political radicalism he saw as necessary for positive change, had found a new home in Plaid Cymru. In his later work, he was developing a view of Wales which saw the country’s potential for a form of socialism which would transfer power to working people through decentralization, small-scale autonomy and sustainable development. Significantly, he no longer looked to England as a reference point but described himself as “a Welsh European”.
In recent years, Labour in Wales has itself made similar, if small and timid, steps away from its historic aversion to nationalism, and from its 1997 offer of a Welsh Assembly which many saw as an unsatisfactory fudge, lacking the tax-raising powers of the Scottish Parliament or constituting merely another example of “jobs for the boys”. (From another perspective it can of course be argued that even the Assembly was a step too far, given the 1979 referendum which saw proposals for Welsh devolution firmly rejected by the Welsh electorate.)
However, much has changed on many fronts since then. Party activists have established @Labour4IndyWales and Labour voters now make up the biggest share of the country’s ‘indycurious’. In May’s elections to the Senedd, Welsh Labour outperformed Plaid Cymru to secure an outright majority, including the shock winning of Leanne Wood’s Rhondda seat. Should pro-independence arguments, then, focus on what’s in it for Labour voters?
A key factor behind both Welsh Labour’s electoral success and the recent growth in support for independence – with Yes Cymru’s current membership rising to 20,000 – appears to have been the unprecedented independence displayed by the Welsh government in their handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Mark Drakeford’s decision to set the terms of coronavirus restrictions in Wales, as well as to provide financial support to businesses, put the kind of “clear red water” between Cardiff and Westminster that has more often been talked about than practically demonstrated.
The potential for this autonomy to be replicated or extended in other areas like the NHS, education, housing or social care is obvious. More fundamentally, it would present a challenge to the hegemony of the British imperial state, which would in turn demonstrate an understanding that the UK is unlikely to survive much longer in its current form.
However, this is something that Welsh Labour is unlikely to do without popular prompting. In early 2021, the Welsh government produced a paper on “radical federalism”, which, despite its laudable calls for “democracy, fairness, justice, climate stability and equality” and for further devolution – including in England – did not countenance independence for Wales. It also, as noted in a piece by Undod’s Robat Idris, took no account of the gulf between these vaguely-socialist proposals and the Welsh government’s adherence for decades to a neoliberal programme.
In a similar way, potentially progressive and well-intentioned legislation like the 2015 Wellbeing of Future Generations Act needs practical backing, if not wholesale constitutional reform, to translate its transformative principles into practice. Would applying pressure on a Welsh government around these issues be easier in an independent state?
Many arguments for independence overlap with the desires of Labour voters. In a March 2021 poll, the top motivation given by those likely to vote for independence was their feeling that Wales has “different social attitudes” to the rest of the UK. Historically, Wales has voted strongly if not invariably for parties of the left, but national results weighted towards England have meant that this has rarely been reflected in Westminster.
Wales also has deep-rooted socialist, anarchist and environmentalist traditions, which under independence might combine to shape alternative social and economic futures through community wealth-building, worker-ownership and decarbonisation, tackling urgent issues from the climate crisis to child poverty. This however would require further devolution to regional and local level, and decentralisation of power from Cardiff as much as from London, something which socialists within Labour should again be arguing for.
The youth and breadth of the current independence movement – and the very fact it tends to style itself as “pro-indy” rather than “nationalist” – seems to signify a conscious turn away from older, frequently reactionary variants of nationalism, while reviving or continuing much of the best of Welsh nationalism’s 1960s left-libertarian traditions. But there are still aspects of life in contemporary Wales where more work needs to be done to resolve internal tensions, to engage with race and racism within debates on “Welsh identity”, and to take account of class, generational and regional diversity too.
We can return to Raymond Williams here. In 1968 the New Left’s May Day Manifesto, which Williams helped write and edit, argued that any progress towards building a new Britain must acknowledge the degree to which the country and its people are enmeshed in the vagaries of international capitalism and imperialism. Williams saw Welsh collectivist politics as similar to those of other left-dissident European peoples, such as the Basque or Catalan nations, but also saw them – as did Gwyn Alf Williams – as the product of a specific shared history and place, rather than any essential ethnic or cultural quality.
Both the past and present of political thought in Wales demonstrate that socialism is compatible with a fight for independence, but also that any such independence must be both internationalist and intersectional.
